The Blood of Roses: Volume 2: Jun, Eujasia, Mechailus

By Tanith Lee

The Blood of Roses Volume 2: Jun, Eujasia, Mechailus - Tanith Lee

 

Against the backdrop of a savage world, in which the bloody religion of the Christerium holds power, strange creatures have formed and stalk the fearsome and magnificent chambers of the great cathedrals. Three characters take up the tale that began in The Blood of Roses: Volume 1.

With Jun, the original sacrifice to the Great World Tree, the story begins to unfurl – how the dark priest Anjelen came to be and acquired such great power, how he managed to subjugate and tame a towering and oppressive regime to do his bidding.

Eujasia takes the reader deep into the secret world of these fluid and mysterious characters – where nothing is as it seems and personalities appear interchangeable. Eujasia seeks Anjelen, but for what ends? Is this the beginning of a dread, unholy alliance or chance of liberation for the oppressed believers of the old ways?

Mechailus is the sum of all stories – and in this enigmatic, kaleidoscopic being the reader learns the truth. What of the strange, impish dwarf, who – originally brutalised throughout the story, a marginalised character abused and scorned – now grows into himself in every way, bringing all tales back to the beginning. A new start, perhaps? Or a warning of what in human hands must inevitably repeat itself?

This book brings to a conclusion the sweeping, macabre epic of belief and desire, once available only as a hardback edition in the UK. This Immanion Press editions gives all readers access to one of Tanith Lee's most complex and chilling works.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Immanion Press
• Release date: Dec 6, 2024
• ISBN: 9798227642493

Tanith Lee

Tanith Lee (1947–2015) was born in the United Kingdom. Although she couldn’t read until she was eight, she began writing at nine and never stopped, producing more than ninety novels and three hundred short stories. She also wrote for the BBC television series Blake’s 7 and various BBC radio plays. After winning the 1980 British Fantasy Award for her novel Death’s Master, endless awards followed. She was named a World Horror Grand Master in 2009 and honored with the World Fantasy Award for Life Achievement in 2013. Lee was married to artist and writer John Kaiine.

Book preview

Book 3

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Chapter One

From the first seed , which fell like a burning moment of time into the hot soil of the beginning, the forest was. Long before it became shadow and substance, and covered over the land, it was a condition of the land. In the earliest days, when men made their way between the slender stalks of it, its bones no wider than sticks, they spoke of it as the great wood. It breathed with winds, wove like a spider a tangle of undergrowth, gave birth out of its loam, was a hive of hidden life.

And when the forest had grown tall, dense and constant, so that trees might fall and not be numbered, the soul of the forest was strong enough that what passed through it or took refuge in it made offering.

At first the offerings had been random. What died there left its decay, its skeleton, its cooling blood. Trees grew from the spines of foxes. Out of the dead cups of human skulls the pines went up.

It began to be that these gifts of building were anticipated.

As though the trees had whispered of a need.

There were those who lived from start to finish in the great wood, never saw another place and disbelieved what they heard. Was not the world one whole forest, perhaps split here and there by waters, and yet the trees grew in the waters too, and only mountains lifted, and the moun­tains were clothed in the forest.

The forest was mother and father, womb and grave, living and extinction. They worshipped the forest, for, being all things, the forest was also God.

In the spring evening, the Chosen, Jun, sat on the ground outside the Woodman’s hut, playing with the hare. The hare was nearly white, a spirit like albino of the forest which came in the afternoon or at dusk to drink the milk put out for it. Sensing, it seemed, that the boy was also special, the hare allowed him to pet it, and would jump over twigs that he held out, or toy with a grass rope. Sometimes the Woodman would ask the hare questions, and the hare would demonstrate its replies by particular movements, or the shape of droppings left on the edge of the clearing. Now and then a spotted snake would also cross the clearing, and the Woodman took note of its track. Latterly, the Woodman too would ask Jun to do certain things, such as selecting from a scatter of objects in the hut or answering a riddle. By now Jun was empow­ered: as he had approached the God day by day, he had waxed more magical. To touch Jun brought a blessing, but very few came to the Woodman’s clearing, which lay below the Tree. The Woodman was the intermediary between the supernatural and the people. The earth there was galvanised, wondrous and danger-filled.

Very soon, several hundred would come to the clearing, but that was different.

From the clearing, in winter, and in spring when the lesser trees were only starred with green, it was possible to behold the Tree, the Lord. It towered up, smooth and purely black. It looked eternal, and so it was. The first tree of the forest, it had spawned every other, of every kind. For the Tree was not of one kind only; even the child could see this for himself. From the huge trunk, the limbs lent out like a crown of snakes, and the leaves, though some were like needles, were fleshy and silken, while others were heavy flags with long veins and ribs in them. The Lord never lost foliage, even when the snow came. This the boy had seen for himself as well, for he had lived here in the Woodman’s hut all winter, under the Tree.

The Choosing was in the late summer, after the garner­ing and harvest. Male children of nine or eight years were brought to the Woodman, from the hutments round about. Even from the Landholder’s estate in the valley they were brought, unknown to the master. He was a convert to the religion of the Christus, the tree-god in other form. Misunderstanding the truth of sacrifice, the Landholder would not countenance what went on in the wood, turned a blind eye to it. His forefathers had come to witness, and at certain eras, when required, had themselves taken the Woodman’s part – even once given a son. This was no longer conceivable.

The nearness of the Lord Tree to the estate, once the reason for the construction there of a landholder’s house, was now awkward, and strange.

Perhaps prudence had caused the snake and the hare to make no choice of boys from the valley.

Of those picked out, a careful scrutiny and interrogation was performed, both by the elder men of the hutments and by the Woodman, their priest. The child must be virgin, must not even have set hand to himself. He must be perfect.

Jun was nine years. He had been worked hard, but never beaten with a rod. Sexual desire of any sort had not yet found him. He had no scars, no irregularity or deformity. He was a quiet boy, with an oval face and thin well-made body sheathed in white skin.

He wanted the honour and the bliss of the Chosen as much as any of the others, but he did not aim at it, did not brag or show off, or make anything of his beauty. There were three other sons in his household; he could be spared. The grace of his choice would see the family favoured. Only the woman wept a little. They usually did.

He did not mind going to live with the priest Woodman in the clearing. It was a wonder. It was the road to Heaven.

For half a year then he was between the God and the world, drawn ever nearer to immortality. He was treated gently, fed the very best, given nothing to do that was not pleasant, instructed in secret rhymes and spells whereby to prove himself at the instant when God took hold of him. Nor, obviously, did he fear that moment. He had been taught it was a commencement, not an end. He would be enhanced, changed, lifted up where the pine tops balanced sun, moon and stars. They were a brotherhood, all those that went before him. He would become the forest; he would become the God. Even the hutments knew that. No, Jun did not fear.

The hare ran across the glade and bowed once to a reed which grew there.

The Woodman stepped from the hut and asked Jun if the hare had bowed.

‘Yes,’ said Jun, and the Woodman, who had been kinder than Jun’s father, smiled at him.

Jun had been in awe of the Woodman. He was perhaps more respectful now, for through the months Jun had watched his priest carry out sorceries both harmonious and unusual. He could call beasts and birds and seemed to know their speech. He had caused a hemlock tree to burn with a still blue flame that left it entire. In lesser ways, the Woodman entertained the child, making items disappear and reappear, or altering them to a semblance or actuality of life – an axe that chopped their wood, a bowl of beans which made patterns... The awe had been enriched by love and trust. A son among a crowd, Jun had never properly known how to love before. In this cocoon between two worlds, there was a margin to find out. The Woodman, now his father on earth, who would give him into the hand of Forever...

‘And which animal do you think,’ the Woodman said now, ‘will you want to be the first?’

Jun knew that once he had become a part of God and the forest, he would be free to experience and to do all things.

‘A hare,’ said Jun. ‘I’ll be a hare and run here to show you.’

‘Do that,’ said the Woodman gravely. ‘One who went before you, long ago, he came to me as a raven, and told me a word of the other life – but not much. He wasn’t allowed to tell too much to me, I being mortal still.’

Jun was jealous of the raven. ‘I’ll tell you,’ he said, ‘more.’

‘No, you’ll think as the God does. Don’t mind it. I’m glad for you, the joy and strength, the happiness you go to. Of them all, my best.’

The shadows lengthened, as they lingered there. The mighty umbra of the Tree came down and put its black­ness upon them. They were silent in the midnight pool of the Tree. Neither had reason to disbelieve. It was only that the priest knew that the child might suffer, some­what, before his transformation. Yet it was the price. He himself would have paid it, to be what the boy would be. He was sad to see Jun go. He would look for a black hare with beautiful eyes.

‘Tonight,’ he said, Jun’s protector, ‘we begin the last teaching. In seven more days, your day will be here.’

‘Truly?’ The boy was eager. He forgot the priest, reach­ing forward with sudden spiritual desire, for godhead, sanctity, power.

His death began at first light, when the Woodman roused him with a warm hand on his brow. There was a cup of holy stuff to drink, a wine manufactured from crimson and brown buds of the wood, the flowers of its floor. Jun did not know what the drink was, did not query. After he had taken it, the enormous half-sickening excitement in him quieted, and a marvellous new emotion, nameless, enveloped him.

The Woodman washed Jun in a tub in the hut. Blos­soms were crushed in the water, which had been heated. Jun’s body was rubbed with aromatics of the pines. He was clad in a goatskin, which had been dressed and was soft on his flesh. Jun felt joy, not knowing quite what joy was.

Outside, there was a mist brushed on the clearing. The sky had a high greenish light.

Two young women came across the glade, and between them, without speaking, set a garland on the boy’s dark head. There were wild roses in it, he could smell their scent, and cones from the pines, ferns, asphodel.

The two women went away speechless, and the Wood­man came, and led Jun over the clearing by hand. (Only once, Jun looked back, hoping to see the hare. But never mind, he should play with the hare as a brother soon enough.)

Outside the clearing, there were people packed between the trees, and as still as the trees, standing up straight like the trees. Jun had never seen this before, since no children but one attended, and no woman who had not born a child. Jun glanced about, for his mother and the man who had sired him, but he could not be sure. The mist veiled everything, and his eyes did not focus nor­mally, and anyway, he did not care.

The Woodman led Jun lightly, steadily, up the slope. Towards the Lord of All.

Not once had Jun gone to the Tree. It was forbidden. Only the priest might go close, might touch. Sometimes he made simple offerings on behalf of his people – carved bone, fruits of the harvest, never, never blood.

They reached the tree.

It was like the whole world.

It was the meaning of the forest, and of being.

A pillar, dividing sky from ground.

The child looked up the length of it, fearless in joy, and saw eternity in the tower of its blackness, in the serpent boughs that flew from it, the wings of leaves and needles. Its colour was perhaps green, but then again it had no necessity of hue, or even texture. It rang and boomed with an immensity of silence and in its immobility was volition. An axis.

These matters the child understood without words. He gazed and was dazzled, felt the God already stretching out.

‘Jun,’ said the Woodman, tenderly, ‘Jun, you must stand here, and let them put a hand or finger on you. Will you do that? For their sake?’

Jun nodded.

He waited in the whirling stasis of the God, and dimly was aware of the fingers and hands on his breast, forehead, arms. A procession passed him. Probably he had known some of them. He was already transfigured. No one expected anything else.

After a while, the procession dwindled, and then it had gone back into a circle, surrounding the Lord, and leaving the Woodman and the boy alone there.

The priest held the hand of Jun.

‘My best, do you trust me?’

Jun nodded again. He smiled.

‘Drink this,’ said the priest. There was a tiny polished acorn which he put to Jun’s mouth. Jun swallowed some­thing that surprised him; it was bitter. He blinked, and the priest said swiftly, ‘Now you may go and embrace the God. When you do that, you’ll be gone from me, and from us all. There may be pain, but that will soon be over. Do you see?’

Jun smiled again. The priest turned him, and there was the pillar of God. It burned like the flame in the hemlock, but black as a winter river. Jun went slowly to the Tree, and lay against it, and put his arms about it. Then he felt its heart, he felt its life. It was as if he grasped the centre of all things, the pivot, the fountainhead. He loved the Tree. He gave himself to the Tree.

Far away, someone had torn the goatskin. A sharp thin stinging blow came on his shoulders and was repeated. It was repeated many times.

Jun felt but did not feel the smart of the briars striking him. He was absorbed by the Tree.

Even when there was another pain, twining his head, curious and startling – he half made to think of it, could not – for neither did this concern him. Only the Tree. Salt fire ran into his eyes, and tears welled out between the lids, so he closed them.

Fire was coursing down his arms, his feet burned wet.

Jun rubbed his cheek against the Tree, and pins of pain stabbed his temples. But then the Tree had gripped him. The Tree pulled him upward, incredibly, by his arms, up and up into itself, into the hub of the world...

Miles above the earth, the child hung, and tipped back his head. He did not bother to look. He was suspended in ecstasy, of which the pains of his body were becoming part.

Above them, the spectators at the sacrifice, whipped and crowned with his second wreath of thorns, the perfect boy swung from the cords of the pulley that bound his wrists. The veins there were already severed, as were those at his ankles. Blood trickled scarlet down the whiteness of the briar-blemished body, down the inebriate and sacred pallor of the face, and splashed the diverse structures of the leaves. His full weight was on the ropes. From the pressure of that, the innocent phallus had engorged. The sight was cruelly exquisite, not obscene or even shameful. It had nothing to do with human lust. Already he gasped, stifling on the ropes. The blood went out in bursts, rock­ing to his struggling heart. If he knew anything anymore was not obvious. The God hovered in the black canopy of the Tree like an eagle descending.

Gradually the worshippers fell to their knees, or full-length on their faces.

The agony in the Tree excluded them. They could only offer it. They were envious of Jun, they loved Jun.

The Woodman stood dreaming, proud of the accomplishment, the glory to which he had sent the best of all the fair and good.

An hour after the sun was up, a gold round in the sky, the wild hunt came over the hill and into the grove where the centre of the forest and the world of the forest had root.

Groups of the congregation were still present; some had paused to catch a trickle of blood from the leaves, which was allowed them, a terrible and divine undertaking. The Woodman was under the Tree, keeping vigil, his old eyes shut. He was an elderly man; this might have been his last officiation. So much was now certain.

The riders of the wild hunt were a storm of green and reddish brown, like levels of the wood itself. In the midst was a purple raven flapping on a square cloth. Immediately they were known, and the people separated from the Tree, flung off from its aura. No longer devout but screaming in fright, they tore down the slope into the pines, where some stumbled, or were chopped to the ground by the clubs of the pursuers.

The Landholder reared in his stirrups, roaring. He was calling them vile and profane things, in the name of the Christus. The grove of the Lord Tree seemed blasted, singed. And the Tree itself had gone to immeasurable distance, leaving merely its emblem, but the Landholder, under his Raven banner, mistook the emblem for the Tree and railed against it. There was a white-faced riding Christus priest too, frothing at the lips, shrieking of Hell, damnation, pits and traps.

Then the noise broke into pieces. They flew off and went to nothing. The elderly Woodman was staring up from beneath the Tree, staring up blind at the Land­holder. One of the rough soldiers of the Landholder had driven a sword into the old man, directly through the heart. The Woodman died moment by moment on the blade, shaking his head, sighing.

The Landholder glared about from his horse. The whole grove seemed to have turned red with bleeding and cloaks and rage. So he shouted again.

‘You see? I’ve put a stop to it – your bloody barbarism. I warned you! I told you. No more. Did you listen? You listen now. I’ll bring you to the true God by my sword. I’ll save you from Hell by steel and the rod. I’ll have you, I’ll have you, you filthy, godless excrement.’

Mailed men were dismounting. They stood attentive. As this happened, the Woodman was pushed off the sword and curled to the ground. The soldiers kicked at him, and laughed, and the Landholder bellowed: ‘Shut your row. Do you see that child up there? Hung like a bit of butcher’s meat – God’s cross...’

And the priest shrieked awful curses, till his throat cracked.

Then the Landholder pointed out who should be striped with the rod, and he sent the soldiers through the women, hacking off great raping swaths of their hair.

‘It’s over,’ said the Landholder. ‘You’ll give no more of your boys to that abomination.’ He looked round, and there were his men, with axes ready. ‘Cut down their Tree,’ he said. ‘Cut it down, make it into kindling. Fire it.’

There were no more cries. Now the silence was com­plete. It was the ending of the world. Pointless to resist.

But a sound came, impossibly, of the first axe upon the Tree.

The Landholder turned his horse abruptly and cantered along the slope. His priest sat there a minute longer, gnawing his mouth, then he too made off.

The soldiers, the dregs of twenty places, paid by the Raven Lord, loyal to the Christus, leered and hurled their axes at the Tree, while the red and white child depended above them.

The forest people free to do so escaped. They ran away. Those who could not averted their faces. They escaped as best they could.

The sun was going up the sky. The thudding of the axes went on like hurt in a wound. The trunk of the Tree was like iron. It would take hours to fell it. The soldiers blasphemed the Tree. They took intervals to drink, and to possess three of four of the comelier women left behind.

Conversion to the Christus had scoured the topsoil of the forest from the soldiers of the Raven garrison. In a stone house in the valley, they took the body and blood of the God, and forgot those similar rituals their progenitors had acted. The new God was more stern in some sort, yet also He could be fooled. You had only to confess, and to pay – in a fast, or a coin – and He forgave you. With the old God, so a part of them vaguely remembered, forgiveness was not anything to do with it. Wrong was wrong. There was no blame, the God did not sob at your sins. But if there was a punishment, you could not buy it off. It was like life itself. Like birth, like breath. Inevitable.

The giant, black and freakish Tree began to give way in the afternoon.

The grove was puddled by tawny lights, and the differ­ing foliages of the tree shimmered with them.

The men had long ago stopped glancing up at the hung child. He was dead. They would have to get out of the path of him, when the tree came down. Then give the brat a proper burial – the Landholder had vowed it – up here, in pagan ground.

The men did not look forward to that. They had done a great deal of killing. Few of them had killed little boys, and never in the foul, disgusting manner of the sacrifice. (They had violated the women particularly viciously, for their wickedness in attending here. The men who had been beaten lay on the turf motionless. It served them right.)

Suddenly, as the sun started to dip into the western sea of the wood, shooting through every intervening bough in showers of chrysolite, the Tree twisted from the axes and turned around upon its riven base like a gargantuan wheel. It seemed to take the measure of the grove, decid­ing if to go towards the south or the west, the sun’s death.

The soldiers leapt away, shouting.

The architecture of the Tree, like a beam of the sky, stroked slowly sidelong with a deceptive smoothness. It met the heads of the pines, a young oak, and smashed them into splinters. From the forest below, against the dying blaze of a sun now entirely visible, birds went up in breakers, calling and trilling. Every tree left standing seemed to give out its creatures like a cry. The under­growth rushed, and a cold wind passed over.

The length of the Tree, the long beam of Heaven, struck the earth.

The ground shuddered. It moved. From a hundred hidden valves and vaults, a murmur rose, and faded in the air like smoke.

Then came nothingness. It was like the stopping of a heart. The whole landscape seemed hollow.

One of the soldiers stamped his feet noisily. ‘That’s done. Where did the corpse go? We’ll have to have it out.’

The boy had gone with the Tree and the pulley and the ropes away into the sunset, downhill. The spume of leaves and birds was sinking there. It had happened none of the captives lay where the Tree had fallen.

The lines of ebbing sunlight shone across the smashed grove. They lit the levelled stump, and one at a time, the soldiers turned to see it.

The hybrid Tree had had huge rings, the centuries of its liveness inscribed within it. They were uncountable, so many. Each ring bled. It was ichor, it was blood, in the dying light it was red.

The Landholder’s men stared at this phenomenon, the bleeding of the Lord Tree. They found out, glimpse by glimpse, that the ruined grove had been splashed and dotted by blood. That they themselves were dappled. That their axes and their hands were crimson.

The blood bubbled up from the stump. It poured over and spilled into the ground. The countless rings of the Tree were no longer to be seen, the blood had obliterated them to a lake of ruby, gleaming back the sunset.

As the framework of a thousand victims had blended with the Tree, grown into it and become the Tree, so their blood, feeding it, had filled the Tree. It was vegetable, but also flesh. Tree, but also man. But also God.

A vessel deep inside the severed trunk erupted.

A fountain of blood sprang into the sky, high as (once), the great Tree, a pillar of fire by day... But the last sun shrank into wood and the sky was an opal, and the fire of the pillar of blood sprayed across Heaven and came down again, drenching the grove beneath.

The soldiers ran screaming, and the horses, tearing from their tethers, raced out with them, neighing and voiding themselves in fear.

The country about was another land. As if a wall of glass contained the grove.

Men and beasts vanished as a second wall of darkness ascended from the earth.

It rained in the night. There was a cloudburst. The forest flooded with sounds of water. Things washed away.

After the rain, the sky was clear, and the stars cracked with cold, shrill light.

When the Christus priest should come, quavering with his cross and faith, in the morning, nothing would speak of anything in the ancient grove but the debris and black stump of a fallen tree.

The punished peasants would have made off; that was to be expected. The corpse of the Woodman, and the child, too, they would be gone. Plainly the peasants had taken these bodies.

The Landholder would hunt the people of his woods for months. He would get slaves. He felt some onus on him yet, to make straight the way of his God. It would require two years of putrid luck, rotten harvests, disease and small terrors to cause another thought to enter him, like a thorn under the skin.

The child had not been dead, at the moment of the Tree’s severance. Dying, adrift... As the life began to wash from the Tree, Jun lay at the brink. He was the Tree’s possession, had been given to the Tree, had given of himself. When the Tree fell, Jun was smashed also, every bone of his body snapped, dislocated, and the skull frac­tured. Jun did not die then. Most of Jun died, and left him there. And the spirit of the Tree, its thunderous, endless power, which was the forest, and the world as forest, entered in.

To Godhead all is possible. Where the psychic dimen­sions overlap, a million angels might dance upon a pin: the teaching of the Church of the Christus.

As the steel rain sluiced the grove, the body of Jun mended itself carefully, piece by piece.

When the eyes of Jun opened, in the starry night, something looked out of them that was not boy and was not tree, having slight memory, having no specific aim or longing.

When the body of Jun arose, and walked away between the walls of the wood, there was only one last impulse, like the faint taste of wine left in an empty cup.

It was the impulse, therefore, which went down into the clearing.

The soldiers had also, on a brief sortie, knocked flat the Woodman’s hut, meaning to return and burn it. Anything of worth they had looted, but there was not much. A charm or two the forest people had already taken to com­fort them, as they had absorbed the cadaver of their priest. The rest of his dwelling sprawled under the injured trees: shorn logs and turf roof, a table in four parts, the tumbled stools and broken vessels.

The pale hare, which had come for its milk and not found it – only outcry above in the grove – came back in the starlight, as if searching. It glowed in its pallor, turn­ing its head, its long forefeet raised, steepled ears listen­ing. When the other hare appeared, the albino retreated nervously. The second hare was stronger. It was dark like the darkness, and propelled itself in a hesitant silky lope. The coat of it was rough as leaves or needles. It rustled as it moved, like the forest overhead. Its eyes were the eyes of a human child.

The white hare darted away.

The black hare went haltingly about the wreckage of the hut.

No one was there, no hint to allay the sunset of a memory.

The black hare lifted to its hind limbs, in the posture the albino had adopted, copying. Then it shifted. Like a cloud over a moon. The child stood up from the cloud. Jun who was not, now, Jun.

And the child who was not Jun, that went away into the night

Chapter Two

The hostel kept for travellers by the religious women was a dismal affair, cheerless and cold. Godbrother Orro was sorry for it. The snows, which had vanished from the forest, lingered in the stone walls, the fireplace with its trickle of flame and few grudging, thin and unencouraging logs left by. The Church instructed that they should be hard upon themselves, but not, surely, on the poor benighted travellers who must seek this haven? For him­self, Orro was used to the comforts of the brother house at Timuce. The family Esnias, that owned the land in the forest, had built the brother house and the chapel there on the forest’s edge. The ground was full of Esnias graves. A pious and belligerent household. And busy. In return for its support, the priests must be prepared to obey the Esnias Tower, besides the Church, let alone God. Vre Esnias had decided that the Hermitages and Domas of his woods should come under scrutiny. He selected Orro for the work. Such tasks normally devolved from Khish, but Orro had not argued. Vre Esnias was suing for pardon from the Church Fathers at Khish, for a feud murder of an overly violent and publicised nature. Everyone must help. But uncomplaining Orro, in his fiftieth year, had found the spring journey difficult. He took this out on no one. Where he discovered laxness, he mildly upbraided, and where repairs were needed, he only prepared a report for his Vre. Perhaps the harsh Handmaidens here might be persuaded to more altruism by the gift of some slight luxuries.

A vicious scratch on the door announced that the Administress had arrived.

Orro bade her enter, and in she came, an ugly warty woman full of resentment and dislike. Though eschewing a mirror, she had cherished the image of her face in her mind. Hatred of God was what had driven her to worship Him. She was a Tower daughter and had refused a mar­riage; the man doubtless had looked askance at her.

Orro spoke gently.

‘I’ve been writing here. Certain items should be sent you, for the upkeep of your charity.’

‘Vre Esnias is godly,’ she snapped. (Esnias was not her Tower.)

‘Please sit,’ offered Orro.

She took the unfriendly chair – he had been making do with the rheumatism-inducing stool. She folded her ugly hands and